wired.com — Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich has a rather curious new addition built in to his latest oversized yacht. Lasers sweep the surroundings and when they detect a CCD, they fire a bolt of light right at the camera to obliterate any photograph.
Sep 21, 2009 View in Crawl 4
fxu1989Sep 23, 2009
I read that with Cartman's voice... in the episode Imagination Land, where Kyle is in the hospital and Cartman dresses up as a pope and tells him what's missing from the sundae.... his nuts.
phoenix919Sep 23, 2009
No standard flash can capture a yacht. Not without a lot of prep work. I know billions of people in a stadium during the olympics click their camera's built in flash, but unless they're trying to snap a shot of the back of someone's head, (or perhaps someone facing the camera) the flash makes no difference, except in post-processing.
happyscrappySep 23, 2009
Thoku:CCDs are used in video cameras. Including high-speed video cameras. The reason dSLRs get "only" 10-20 fps is because of the slowness of the shutter and mirror, not the CCD charge time.This thing won't be able to detect a CCD charging up from any distance. Look, any emitted radiation from charging up would have to come out of the battery in the camera. And these cameras are designed to take hundreds of shots on a charge.If you can take 400 shots on a 2W battery, that means each shot takes less than 5mW. Even if you sent the entire 5mW right into an antenna, it'd still be difficult to detect from a distance unless you already had a parabolic antenna pointed at the transmitter. With antennas you have a choice, good sensitivity or wide angle reception. I don't think you're gonna have any luck picking up the energy of a CCD charging from 200 yards away with a non-directional antenna.
markdgod7Sep 23, 2009
I guess it wasn't working when they took this photograph.
Closed AccountSep 23, 2009
WOW!
lennyd44Sep 25, 2009
I'm on a MOTHER f**kIN yacht
Closed AccountSep 28, 2009
scrappy. you're glib. Everything you just said makes no sense whatsoever. A charge coupled device doesn't need to 'charge' before it can take a picture. The delay between shots is from a bottleneck between the CCD, internal cache, and storage card.Camera's emit no special signal/radiation/whatever undisclosed emission that you described as 5mw. 2 watts is not a parameter of battery storage. using emf to find a camera would be worse than finding a needle in a pile of needles. Too many devices make noise to even try sorting one type of device out unless it has a very clear profile and there is little noise in the backround.Reaction time isn't even necessary. All that's needed is a infrared strobe and a sensor that watches for retro-reflected light. A long lens pointed at the boat would create a reflection like that (as well as license plates, stop signs, cats eyes and retro-reflecting sighting equipment like surveyors instrumentation). Even binoculars would create a detectable reflection though the observer would be oblivious to the IR spotlight they have on their eyes. Where this electronic nonsense is coming from is beyond me. And illumination based photo countermeasures do work. Linking the input of a good strobe (like 1500 joules. bright, hot, and power hungry, but consumer attainable) to a photocell and trying to take a picture of it with a camera that has it's own synced flash unit will create a washout all the way to about 1/1600th sec even in daylight with f/32.
eddiepotatoOct 2, 2009
I'm gonna make a whole site based on this thread. It will be awesome.
alienmushroomOct 11, 2009
But my camera uses BIOS sensor... Maybe another 1.2 billion will kill that too? /s